a weekly summation.

There are quite a few things that I would like to say about Josiah and life, but I don't know if I will be able to adequately disclose all of it in the time I have allotted. I find myself narrating it in my head often, visualizing the descriptive and witty sentences I might use to describe a situation, but by the time I actually make it to the computer I am rushed, and my thoughts don't pan out on the keys as fluidly as I had hoped.

If I had the opportunity to write over the last week, I would have talked about the following topics and observations that have all occurred sporatically and have ended up on a jot sheet of paper, prompting me to recall them.

Josiah Rich is coming into his own. He is doing all kinds of funny, peculiar things, like right now, where he is dangling his head over the A/C vent in the floor, wild hair flying back with the wind, completely intrigued by chilling his body in the draft. Now his hair looks remarkably like Ace Ventura and he is cool to the touch.

He has become extremely vocal, hollering and exploring the appropriateness of changing his volume. The other night at Jonathan's concert, he yelped sporatically, as if he thought he was belting a song, too.

He has discovered the joy of stairs, and we have learned to be extremely grateful for the door that blocks ours. He also greatly enjoys opening drawers, but he isn't proficient enough to prevent slamming his fingers. Because of this, Mom and Dad don't greatly enjoy him opening drawers. The other day he opened Jonathan's t-shirt drawer, and I watched in anticipation of him pulling out the shirts, but it was as if he hadn't really thought that far. He just sat and grinned, pleased with himself for opening the drawer and only delicately touched the t-shirts resting inside. I did think to myself, "I will not be so lucky for very long."

One day last week, nap time was approaching and Mr. Rich was becoming quite the fuss-pot. He was in the kitchen, and I called to him from my seat in the living room. He started to crawl toward me, but mid-trip he went into meltdown mode. He paused, cried, and put his head down to the floor. When he got his head down in between his arms, he suddenly turned his head to the side and began blowing huge farts into his arm. I started cracking up. It seemed to calm him down some, and I went to pick him up from his stranded position. He did it again a couple of days later.

We were driving to Birmingham the other day and I looked in the back seat to see him managing to get his toes in his mouth despite being restrained in the car seat. I couldn't help but laugh at this, too.

I have become a personal jungle gym during play time. It is apparently very entertaining to crawl all over Mom, so I just sit and watch him pull up on my legs, thrust himself over my lap, pause to inspect my mouth, and then tumble down the other side of me. The greatest challenge has been that during nursing time, he is practicing to become a professional Twister player. He tries to throw his body in all directions, flailing his limbs and moving from laying in my lap to kneeling in my lap...all the while still nursing. Apparently if you let go while moving, the game is over. I have tried to contain it, but I rarely succeed. He mostly sleeps on his stomach now, so when he is getting ready for bed he thinks he should be able to nurse as if he is laying like a stinkbug in my lap, too. All in all it is pretty amusing and occasionally painful. Certain parts of me don't appreciate Twister the way he does.

Now that Josiah is standing up pretty well, he is very quick to stand in protest in his crib. The very SECOND he wakes up, he shoots to the edge of his crib, pulls up, and starts to scream in protest. I have observed it through his bedroom windows. I always thought that babies would wake up happy and if they cried it wasn't time to get up. Not with this kid. He is perfectly happy once he is out of the crib, but he is very vocal about its only good purpose being sleep. If he is not sleeping, he better not be in it. It reminds me of a quote from Anne Lamott's 'Operating Instructions': "Nap time is now impossible because he ends up standing in his crib, grasping and shaking the slats like someone in an old James Cagney prison movie, shouting idle threats." Indeed my child is the same way.

Hopefully I have touched on all of the things I wanted to say. For about two weeks now I have forgotten to mention how he is actually crawling on his hands and knees and not his belly. It is old news at this point. Now I am going to play with him in the few minutes I have before work.